Most authors-top-notch, middle-road or low-rung-tend to arrive, at some point, at the question of what to write about. When it comes to poets, this question is more interesting than you might think. A poet writing about children in a playground might really be depicting war; another narrating an intense personal anecdote might be composing a prayer to God. This is the trouble with poets and their metaphors. Half the time, you have no idea what those folks are really writing about. What complicates matters is that most poetry subjects, at bottom, are pseudo-subjects: they keep the metre flowing, the clowns dancing and the tempest pounding, so that the poem’s real subject anchors invisibly in the reader’s heart.
In his new book, Between the Walls, Paul Vermeersch scrutinizes our social underbelly, and hones in on the modern indifference of people and objects alike. Look, for example, at the first two stanzas of “The Lights Keep Changing”:
The lights keep changing. Cars and trucks
are nudged into motion by the winking
permission of a green signal, and a grey pigeon
undistinguished from the million others
roosting quietly in the city’s details
is startled by the sudden noise of traffic.
One technique I admire, besides the fluid rhythm, is Vermeersch’s use of passive verbs to deny the cars, trucks and the pigeon any ability to act freely. But right from the beginning, you know this poor pigeon’s got it coming. Sure enough, the bird is “clipped by a passing Audi” and staggers around for the remainder of the poem, suffering horribly. Most of the book depicts suffering: brawls “behind curtains and deals going down”, “meagre / meals dished out with love / or resentment or resignation”, suburban men who “hate one another” and “do not touch their wives”, and the summing-up statement that “Life today // is still as ruthless as ever”. In the final section of the book, entitled “As is”-a section that contains some of the book’s best writing-he reels in a fair collection of dreary facts: people live “in pursuit / of stunted monthly recompense”; in the sky there is “no bird, or plane, or anyone”; and commuters driving home “through the city’s / crumbling arteries” think only of “laundry, home” and listen to-what else?-a news report about a murdered child.
There is no doubt, of course, that such grim facts as drug addiction, murders, poverty, global warming and domestic violence exist. I have to admire Vermeersch for seeking, as I think he does, to burst the bubble of human indifference and apathy. The first poem I mentioned justly portrays this suffering as often happening, not because anyone is to blame, but because of happenstance. How could a “passing Audi”, for instance, be blamed for killing a pigeon on the highway when it is perfectly normal for Audis and other cars to rush along roads to get to places on time? To resist human indifference, however, and encourage empathy-and this is partly what I think Vermeersch is trying to do-requires being able to let the subject of the poem take over from the tight-fisted convictions of the author. In “Lawn Kings” for example, suburban men may indeed be as unhappy and resentful as he portrays them, but instead of exposing the intensity of this despair, Vermeersch instead opts to simply remark on it and add, somewhat scornfully, that on Sundays these men at church “listen to an argument for decency / without which they fear they would all turn to sin.” Too much of the book, in other words, is surface commentary or opinion, not the muscular intensity of close attention and strong feeling.
A related reservation I have about Vermeersch’s book is that, much of the time, I just don’t believe him. People seek a great deal more than a paycheque, think about more than laundry, and listen to more on the radio than murder reports. Reality, in other words, is many-sided and complex, but Vermeersch doesn’t really seem interested in this complexity: he has already made up his mind that life sucks, big-time, and his poems seem like attempts to convince us he’s right. Gloom can spur powerful poetry. T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land, was, in his own words “a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” The difference is that Eliot’s poem enabled the reader both to understand his despair more clearly (as a Western phenomenon as well as a personal grief) and to glimpse beyond that despair a possible joy. A poet who leaves readers stranded on horrific facts does only half the job-for poetry springs less from reportage than from the imaginative vision that its troubling facts excite. But don’t tell that to Vermeersch. “Lawn Kings”, “The Iron Gates”, “Brights Grove” and “Preparations for the Winning Ticket all sag under saturnine thoughts penned in weary prose. At times, though, Vermeersch is capable of quite astonishing associations. Here is an couplet from the second stanza of “The Mission House”:
He felt old friendships like noiseless deer
receding into various alpine landscapes
The unexpected comparison is remarkable: you can sense the deer close-up, retreating among trees. Then you are suddenly aware, as the poem changes perspective, of entire “alpine landscapes”, where these deer have disappeared and where old friendships have petered out into silence. The deer in the final line zip the stanza closed, taking their noiseless mystery with them. This couplet is poetry at its best-even the vowels in the second line vary like alpine landscapes, and unravel from iambic foot to iambic foot.
Richard Carter (Books in Canada)
